A. Field of the Invention
Systems and methods described herein relate to document presentation and management and, more particularly, to the presentation of documents online.
B. Description of Related Art
Modern computer networks, and in particular, the Internet, have made large bodies of information widely and easily available. Free Internet search engines, for instance, index many millions of web documents that are linked to the Internet. A user connected to the Internet can enter a simple search query to quickly locate web documents relevant to the search query.
One category of content that is not widely available on the Internet, however, are the more traditional printed works of authorship, such as books and magazines. One impediment to making such works digitally available is that it can be difficult to convert printed versions of the works to digital form. Another impediment to making such works digitally available is that such works tend to be of relatively high individual value and tend to be more permanent creations than much of the content that is freely available on the Internet. A two-hundred page book, for instance, is likely to have taken significant time to research and write. The author may understandably not desire to make the book freely available, although the author may desire to allow some restricted access to the book, such as for marketing purposes.
One solution to the problem of not giving away the content of a document, such as a book, while still using the ubiquity and convenience of the Internet to publicize the document, involves giving readers limited access rights to the document. Numerous ways to limit access rights to a document are known. For example, only a limited portion of the document (e.g., no more than 5% of the entire document) may be shown to a reader.
In the situation where a content provider provides access to numerous documents from a number of authors/publishers, the different authors/publishers may desire to enforce a different limited set of access rights for their different documents.